Publishers Weekly
08/29/2022
Delaney’s eerie, Canada-set debut centers 17-year-old biracial (Black and white) Asha Walker, who relocates to her estranged mother’s majority-white New Brunswick hometown to escape scrutiny following her father’s recent embezzlement conviction. When Asha and mom Traci move into a crumbling mansion owned by Traci’s late aunt, they’re longing for a new start. Though Asha hopes this change will be the perfect chance to reinvent herself, New Brunswick presents her with overwhelming interpersonal challenges. She feels unwelcome due to the town’s history of racial prejudice; her presumed-white and Lebanese neighbor, alluring Cole Levesque-Gerges, sparks unexpected feelings; and the arrival of Traci’s deceptive beau strains the pair’s already tense relationship. What’s more, she’s unsettled by increasingly chilling encounters with the spirits of her family’s dark past, which inhabit her new home. Though themes such as colonialism, police violence, and white privilege are only summarily explored, leading to underdeveloped messaging, and sporadic pacing causes narrative disconnect, Asha and Cole’s clash over their respective lived experiences is intensely rendered. Delaney capably crafts a creeping sense of horror that infuses this pensive paranormal tale with dread. Ages 14–up. (Oct.)
Kirkus Reviews
2022-07-27
A haunted house, family, girl.
Asha Walker is having a hard time. The 17-year-old’s father is in prison for alleged embezzlement from a youth sports center (though anti-Black racism is a more likely culprit), and her mom is moving the two of them back to her family home in small-town New Brunswick. Locals believe the house is haunted, and Asha slowly comes to agree with them as events escalate from seeing faces in the ceiling and feeling spooky presences to full-on possession and ghostly violence. A variety of themes swirl around the story like spirits: Asha’s relationship with her family, including her menacing stepfather; her own burgeoning queerness; her new friend’s coming-out process; and Asha’s Black and mixed-race presence in a town founded on racial exclusion and violence (her mother’s ancestors were White settlers who arrived a few centuries ago). The slow pace means the plot picks up very slowly, and the truly creepy moments are tempered by the caring natures of two of the ghosts. There are plenty of metaphors to be mulled over, though one—“This place is…haunted with whiteness”—is pulled out explicitly for readers, and many other moments are laid out in ways that unfortunately feel more like arguments the author makes to readers rather than richly realized characters organically coming to their own conclusions.
An atmospheric story let down by more telling than showing. (Paranormal. 13-17)
